At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’m going to piggyback on your comment, because this is something that comes up in my work and is confusing for a lot of people, and has become a bit of a bugaboo.
Average and mean are often used interchangably, but they are NOT perfect synonyms.
Average essentially just means ‘a number that best represents a data set’. While the arithmetic mean is the most common way of finding that, median and mode are also methods (and there are other, more complex methods in some cases, as well as best practices for some data such as removing outliars, etc).
This is important because there is no objectively correct way to find the ‘average’ of a set of data.
It’s a judgement call and it is sometimes used by bad faith actors to skew a message or just by people who don’t really know what they’re doing. If you’re reviewing research, it’s always important to clarify how they obtained their average and consider if that was the best method. (Similarly if someone says something “doubles your risk of X”, make sure you find out what the original risk was! The double of .0005 is probably not something you have to worry about. “Doubles the X” is a great way of making a number sound big when it might not be large at all.)
Appropriately for this thread, I actually read this book when a guy I was dating at the time told me it was his favorite. He was a great guy and I understand he’s now a great husband (we are still peripherally in touch). Politically we are reasonably well aligned.
But yeah, the traits within him that loved that book and the traits within me that loathed that book are definitely a part of why we were a poor match.